Update: All data (and photos) from 500-year-old Jewish cemetery in Busk, Ukraine are now online

(JHE) — Photographs and data from the 461 surviving headstones in the 500-year-old Jewish cemetery in Busk, Ukraine have now been uploaded and are viewable online.

These include the oldest known Jewish headstone in Galicia — that of Yaakov Leizer Arie, who died exactly half a millennium ago, on November 23, 1520, as well as the data on what were described as the sensational new findings of 10 or so gravestones from the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

The database, posted on the Jewish Galicia and Bukovina (JGB) web site, is the fruit of the JGB’s  Jewish cemetery documentation Field School in the summer of 2019, which we wrote about at the time.

In addition to a photograph, the data for each stone includes its measurements (height, width, thickness), its GPS coordinates, date of death of the person interred, and a transcription of the Hebrew epitaph.

There is also a detailed map of the cemetery, showing the position of each stone.

The documentation was carried out under the leadership of Dr. Boris Khaimovich, an expert in Jewish art, and Dr. Ilia Lurie, a scholar of Eastern European Jewry (both from the Hebrew University), together with Marina Brook, a Jewish cemeteries researcher from St. Petersburg, Russia.

“We knew that Busk is the home to the oldest Jewish gravestone in Ukraine – dated 1520, but during our work we’ve uncovered and documented about 10 gravestones from the period between the [late 16th] century and the early 17th century: large stone tombs with impressive rabbinic phraseology that were unknown to researchers,” Lurie told JHE at the time.

It is kind of sensational finding, because tombstones (especially with such an elaborate inscriptions) from before the 1648 Khmelnytsky massacre are extremely rare in Eastern Europe. They are unique testimony to the longevity and strength of the Jewish community in this early period and [shed] a new light on the history of the Jews of Galicia.

Other interest finds, the JGB web site says, included a special section of tombstones of community doctors who worked in the town in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Among them there was discovered the tombstone of the community’s doctor, Arie Yehuda Leib (Leon) Szeps, the father of Moriz Szeps (1835-1902) – a Vienna press tycoon and a prominent activist in the liberal movement in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The previously unprotected cemetery was enclosed by a fence erected in 2019 by the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative ESJF.

Click to access the database on the JGB web site

Click to see pictures of the ESJF fence